Vanishing Roads and Other Essays eBook

One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all
his genius, was on one important subject—­that
of poetry—­as much of a bull in a china-shop
as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he
and Tennyson, the famous anecdote a propos
of Tennyson’s publication of The Idylls of
the King—­“all very fine, Alfred,
but when are you going to do some work”—­and
many other such written deliverances suffice to show
how absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist
and rhetorician may be on an art practised by writers
at least as valuable to English literature as himself,
say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.
Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these
four gentlemen who, according to his standard, never
did any “work” have a strangely permanent
look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist
of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.

A similar “sage,” another of the great
conversational brow-beaters of English literature,
Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to
be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on
the matter than Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson
might with truth be described as the King Bull of
all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was
no subject, however remote from his knowledge or experience
on which he would hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary
bludgeon forth, his opinion. But in his case,
there is one important distinction to be made, a distinction
that has made him immortal.

He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with
such quaintness, with such engaging sturdiness of
character, strangely displaying all the time so unique
a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses
all china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common
sense, oddly linked with that good old-time quality
called “the fear of God,” that in his
case we felt that the china, after all, didn’t
matter, but that Dr. Samuel Johnson, “the great
lexicographer,” supremely did. His opinions
of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves
amount to little—­though they are far from
being without their shrewd insight—­and
much of the china—­such as Milton’s
poetry—­among which he gambolled, after
the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible.
Any china he broke was all to the ultimate good of
the china-shop. Yet, if we accept him so, is
it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the
china-shop of the world?

There have been other such bulls but hardly another
so great, and with his name I will, for the moment
at least, put personalities aside, and refer to droves
rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type
of the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman,
who, apparently, insecure in his status of saint-hood,
dissatisfied with that spiritual sphere which so many
confiding human beings have given into his keeping,
will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome,
yet quite unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil
of human affairs—­of which politics is a